Kiren Sekar, Chief Product Officer at Samsara, discusses how prototyping customer-requested dash cameras led to the company's leading product line.
Insight
Sekar: Saying yes to customers creates more outsized impact than rigid focus
“There's a lot of people who say, You need to say no to as many things as possible and focus. Not saying you should never focus, but also you should say, well, for a customer, how could I say, say yes to as much as possible? And sometimes that feels unnatural, …”
Insight
Sekar: Selling to discretionary IT budgets creates false product-market fit signals
“There were some customers who would buy something because they thought it was neat, and the IT department had discretionary budgets. They're technologists. They thought that something was cool, and it's actually really dangerous because as a startup, you think…”
Insight
Sekar: Broad market strategy enables cross-pollination of product features across industries
“If you hyper optimize there, there's a risk that actually you build something that is, is so narrow that it ends up not really providing leverage in other, other industries. Whereas if you take the other approach and say, I want to actually engage with a broad…”
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Sekar: Samsara hired its first SDR before having a finished product
“And in fact, we hired our first ADR or SDR before we had a product to sell. And their job was to book demos. So myself and one of our product managers could basically do Live demos of what we were building and get people to say, hey, I will try this out once i…”
Insight
Sekar: Overcoming Frontline Tech Pushback Requires Leadership Examples and Incentive Sharing
“Oh, you know, what we did was we started by first putting it in the VP of safety's own car so they can see that we're doing it ourselves. And then we start by putting it on the five safest drivers cars, the absolute best ones. And invariably there is an accide…”
Insight
Sekar: Customer centricity only counts when it costs something
“It only counts when it costs you something, right?”